What's up everyone? I'm Andrea, your RealLife English Fluency Coach, and today we have an
incredibly inspirational lesson for you. But before we get into it, I want to let you know that
every week we make lessons to help you learn fast English. Without getting lost, without missing the
jokes and without subtitles. Just like this fan who says that by watching our lessons
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Cristiano Ronaldo has many accolades to his name. Obviously he is one of the best football players
to have ever lived. Not only that, but he's a successful businessman, a pop culture icon and a
millionaire. He is also however a philanthropist, meaning that he does a lot of charity work.
And what's most relevant for us is that he is a successful English language learner.
So whether or not you are one of his millions of fans around the world,
you and him have something in common: you're both on an English language journey!
You and Cristiano probably had a similar start with the language.
This video that has recently gone viral shows a very young 18 year old Ronaldo, in fact when he just
joined Manchester United and he barely spoke any English. However, if you contrast that to his most
recent interviews in English, the improvements are remarkable.
Although his improvement is amazing he does still make mistakes. However mistakes are a secondary priority for him.
The most important thing for him is getting his meaning across, so the most important thing for
him is to communicate clearly and effectively.
So he doesn't let his mistakes affect his confidence.
In fact on and off the pitch Ronaldo is known for his amazing confidence.
He doesn't care if people laugh at his mistakes and as you can see in this video, he actually values effort over perfection,
when this young fan tried really hard to speak in Ronaldo's native language of Portuguese.
Going back to this interview of an 18 year old Ronaldo just arriving in Manchester.
What you can admire about this is that even knowing very little English, Ronaldo put himself
in a vulnerable position. He knew that he could make a fool of himself but he didn't care. Do you
know why? He didn't because he didn't feel sorry for himself. In fact what he did was laugh it off,
which is a great attitude to have sometimes. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't make the effort
or that you can always do this, but in certain moments it's a good attitude to have so that you
don't get too down on yourself or frustrated by the fact that you can't express yourself.
What you can later on do is go home and reflect on the situation and think about how you could
improve on it next time or make sure that it doesn't happen again in the same way, which
is something I'm pretty sure Ronaldo probably did as well. While we can certainly admire his
attitude here, there is something to learn from Ronaldo's mistakes he said, "No understand."
Although most natives will forgive you for answering this way if you have a very basic
level, once you are an intermediate or a lower intermediate learner you need to have better
conversation or etiquette. At this level you're going to be in situations where you're not quite
understanding what the other person is saying to you. So it's best to avoid any of these words or
expressions. Instead of saying "what?" you could say "sorry" or "excuse me" or even "pardon."
"Pardon" or even "I beg your pardon," which is a little bit more posh and a little bit more formal,
is probably a little bit more British than American. They would probably rather say "sorry"
or "excuse me." Any one of these would have been better than saying "no understand." Other options
are "sorry, I didn't quite catch that" or "sorry, can you repeat that please."
You could even speak more informally and say "say that again please" or even taking this informal
expression and making it a little bit more polite by saying "can you say that again,
please?" These are great survival phrases and some others could be "what do you mean?"
or for example, if you're the one speaking and you cannot think of a particular word
you could even say "how do you say blank?" and the blank word could be spoken in your native
language. Or instead you could say "how do you say...?" and then give a sort of description,
hoping that the person that you're speaking to might know the word that you're looking for.
Now let's take a look at this fun clip from the Jonathan Ross Show.
We actually made a great lesson on British accents and we even spoke about Sir Alex
Ferguson's Scottish accent. So if you'd like to have a look at that lesson, you can click
up here or in the description box below to watch it later.
Now let's hear Cristiano talk about motivation in this quick clip.
Obviously motivation is going to be a very important factor in your success of learning English.
What Cristiano is saying here
is that mentality is the most important thing. Your mindset is going to determine whether or not
you will be successful. This is probably one of the most inspiring things about Cristiano Ronaldo,
as well as his work ethic, which to this day no matter how successful he becomes remains
incredibly high. This can be a great lesson for English language learners everywhere,
because no matter how successful you become or how fluent you become at speaking in English, you can
always keep working and always keep improving. So whether you're a fan of Cristiano Ronaldo or not,
I really hope that you enjoyed this lesson and that you've taken something away from it that's
going to motivate you, that's going to help you to achieve your English learning goals.
So in this lesson we took a look at all the great things that Ronaldo does,
but what about the things that you should not do? Well if you head over to RealLife English,
our second channel, you'll find a great lesson that we did on the 7 Things
not to do when Speaking in English. So I highly recommend you check that lesson out next.
Now which famous sports star or celebrity would you like us to feature in a lesson next?
Leave your suggestions in the comments below and I'll see you in the next lesson.